Hiatuses..eses

1) my personal computer bit the big network in the sky, and is in rehab right having it's hard drive replaced. Thank you, 3 year warranty I felt like a sucker buying 2 1/2 years ago. This means I will not be updating for a while, because writing a post on a phone sucks. 

2) Yesterday was so weird. It started off in an awesome warm gray rain, and I drove to a friends storefront apartment above a sunday morning Lorain Avenue for brunch which was great and relaxed and matched the rain perfectly.  Then I ran off to meet Jere and his daughter at the art museum. Agatha showed me her favorite abstract paintings, and I glowed a little at the contemporary landscapes photography exhibit, which had fantastic views of trees and nickel waste rivers and bomb casings. We sat in the glass sculpture room and watched the rain. Next we all drove to Legacy village, which is like, the most offensive place on the planet. It's one of those rich people malls set up to look like fake village streets and old victorian facades. It was still pouring and we tried to dry off in Starbucks before sitting as judges for a chef challenge, and I'm not even sure how that happened but somehow I ended up speaking into a microphone about Jonathan Waxman's crab corn spaghetti, in front of Waxman himself. Then we got frozen yogurt, and dropped Agatha off at her mommy's. Jere and I didn't really know what to do at that point, so we drove to the Valley to look for seedy bars. Geo told us to meet him at a strip bar called The Happening, down the street from the Ernest Angley Cathedral Buffet, in a brick storefront with the hallway behind the locked door lit up like a siding installation business. It was closed and we hopped across the street to some sports bar which didn't have a fucking sunday liquor license and instead we ended up in the strip we always end up, at the Matinee talking to graphic design students with white ear plugs and Geo and Jere told crazy stories about the crazy teachers at the crazy super christian high school they both went to. Jere talked about his "prophecies" class, and how he announced to everyone he had interpreted Daniels prophecy as the fact that the moon was a giant egg and it was going to hatch into a dragon. Then Geo told me about the time Jere traded him a samurai sword for an electric typewriter, which turned out to be covered in dried blood I was told was from stabbing rats in the wall. I mean, truth? Who knows. 12 hours before I had no idea I was going to be drunk in Akron listening to them arguing about means of production. I had reached a point of acceptance. Truth was relative. Jere drove us home and we talked about secret stuff. Then a few short hours later I woke up, picked up Carrie at the market, and went to Washington Place where they were filming a food network show, Curious Eats? I don't know, there's just film and tv people crawling all over Cleveland this week. People keep sending me pictures of explosions from the Avengers set. The crew all had the very cutest sneakers, one girl had bronze Prada ones. I had awesome scallops and the cameras watched us taking bites of food which made us instantly forget how to chew like human beings. I don't eat seafood but somehow I ended up eating and enjoying a lot of it. Then we had donut bread pudding and as we were leaving the valets talked about karma and one of them hugged me, but not the one who pointed out that karma was a newtonian principle. 

3) So as I will not be updating here for a while, when you are wondering what I'm up to,  it's stuff like that. 

The Where I'm From Post

Elly did this on her blog, which she got from here, and I like it, so I'm going to do it too.

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I am from the rocking chair, from lightbulbs and guitars.

I am from the house on 54th, small and surrounded by the double yard, with the triple barn garage full of old tools and millstones and what I imagined when I was little were blacksmithing weapons, because the smithy used to be that foundation of bricks the strawberry patch and peach tree were in now. I am from another house later which was bigger and older and came to us with amateur murals of cherry trees on the walls and was to be filled with dead gerbils and photogenic dogs.

I am from architectural posters and medieval history books about plagues, from Tom Wolfe novels left on bookshelves outside the bathroom and pictures books about How Things Worked. National Geographic map inserts I stashed away.

I am from the willow tree that towered above the houses, and the daffodils that covered the driveway sides. The giant tree that stood on our tree lawn until it grew so tall and strong and thick it pulled up the street plumbing and they butchered it.

I am from a need to be funny and a tendency to disagree, from Kowalski,and Soltys, Cahill and Callahan. I am skilled at talking people down.

I am from a rustbelt migration that stretches from Eastern Europe to Cleveland.

I am from the tight lipped look of disappointment and the cooing hum of surprised approval.

From French fairy tales translated by Germans that were told at bedtime and the foibles of first generations off the boat that were told at holidays.

I am from the Catholic Church. Which taught me how to stay quiet and when to volunteer for things, and how to tell when things were beautiful and what saints I should seek solace from.

I am from Akron and Philadelphia and Latrobe and steel Youngstown and rural Maryland and Poland and Ireland and Wales. From corned beef, and Christmas pierogis, Dad's liverwurst sandwiches and Diet Coke, Mom's wheat thins, sardines, and sweet gherkins.

I am from the bright colored collection of cast iron pots and skillets brought back from Europe we burned scrambled eggs in.

From the basement gym of St. Wendelins and the school yard at St. Malachis where we played foursquare. The box of colored pencils Mom used for her Grays Anatomy coloring book in nursing school. Riding the Green Line to Shaker in the snow, and shivering in our underdressed high school outfits while waiting for the buses home on Public Square as the wind caught our giant backpacks and tried to topple us, and it was always dark before we got home in the winter.

I am from the newspaper pictures of Dad young and earnest and Mom's big round glasses and multicoloured J Crew sweaters, all packed away in large tupperware storage boxes, somewhere in the attic under disintegrating sociology essays and homeopathic textbooks.

A Name! A Name!

Mom went and got another dog. We told her to get a very large dog that would be protective, but also too big to run around a lot, and not very energetic. Instead she came home with a beagle/spaniel mix which strongly resembles a jack russell on steroids, and barks like one too. He is very lovable and friendly though, so I guess maybe he can stay, I guess. I guess he already knew how to sit in order to get treats from me, and how to fetch, and so I guess I'm already in love with him. Oh ingratiating species! Here are the names my mother, my sister and I threw around while eating tomato sandwiches and drinking moscow mules on the porch last night, because I think its amusing and shows you about my family and what we are:

Bojangles
Oliver
Henry
BJ
Grendel
Lancelot
Percival
Oberon
Puck
Captain
Churchill
Iago
Fortinbras (this one is my personal favorite, because it was the name of another dog in a book I love very very much)
Opie
Gellert
Buck
Inspector
Poirot
Benedict
Peter
Agamemnon
Romeo
Jupiter
Apollo
General Lee
Patton
Jane
Gatsby
Indiana

Of course, he came with the name Byron. So we'll see. Indiana was last in the lead, but Gellert grew on me overnight. Poor Gellert, who killed the wolf and was then punished unjustly by his master. And obviously, this isn't my decision at all. Mom has probably already named him something completely different.

The Various and Important Dangers of Ohio Beaches

The Various and Important Dangers of Ohio Beaches

1) They will not let you stay on the beach at night. First a man will make an announcement, the very minute slash second that the sun goes down he will say "The beach is now closing." If you do not leave the water immediately, first they send a patrol in a sand buggy with headlights careening down the coast towards you. If you refuse to come in from the water, the frogmen are deployed from the base underneath the lighthouse. If you positioned yourself correctly at the far end, you have ten minutes to hide. The frogmen have underwater propulsion packs. If you manage to get out of the water undetected and into the treeline, your best bet is to head for a high tree. See #2.

2) Night monkeys. All Ohio beaches are infected with night monkeys, a particularly hostile and territorial type of squirrel monkey. During the day they are benign and dormant, but at night they are vicious defenders of their nest, and have no aversion to eating meat. Once they start to swarm, you are out of luck. Even if you drop out of the tree, they will continue to pursue you, dozens at a time. Your only mercy is that these vermin are slower on the sand than up above in the foliage, so make for clear sand. But then of course, frogmen. Enslavement in the salt mines has to be better than being eaten by monkeys though. I think.
3) Death by rocks. Swallowed up by the rocks. Cut and poisoned by rocks. Beat to death under the water by rocks. Seduced into the rocks' worldview, which includes suicide as a viable way to get out of paying taxes. Tripped by rocks and hurled face first into the wooden picket fence. Accidentally eat a rock and have really good digestion for a few years, but then die because you ate a rock. Accidentally eat a rock and don't die, but then go on a talk show and later get your own TLC show as the girl who eats rocks, be unable to live with your fans constantly sending you baskets of gravel, die on a cocaine molly binge drowning in a kiddie pool in your backyard naked.

4) Pirates. Vagabonds. Marauders. Dogs. All things that travel in packs and want to eat your intestines. Pretty easily avoidable though.

5) Kidnapped by shadow people and forced to breed with them, in their attempt to make their species take corporeal form. Shadow people have barbed genitals, like cats. Also they only drink lake water for sustenance. When a shadow person is born, it chews it's way out from utero. To protect yourself from being taken, never engage a shadow person in funny little dances or miming for your friends. Always carry a torch with you. Don't let them get behind you. Travel in groups.

6) Yeast and Algae monsters. Banished most of the year to the deeper parts of the lake, these terrifying blooms of filthy nasty toxic teeming bacteria are sentient and naturally mean. On very hot days, they like to swim inland to bask in the radioactivity of our dying sun, and this is when you must watch out for them the most. Have you ever had a yeast infection? Now imagine a fully body yeast infection. Or bleeding from your eyes. Or developing alien strength, speed and gills. Never eating solid food again because your body produces energy by photosynthesis. Their tentacles reach deep under the water, to grab at your ankles, and all it takes it one open hole in your body, a cut or your mouth or the inside of your eyes, and you're infected. Done for.


7) Sand Sharks. Sharks that live under the sand and eat your spare change, flip flops, blankets, wallets, tshirts, bikini bottoms, also your piggly wiggly little toes and your feeling of well being. Their teeth are rounded like herbivores, but their jaws have the force of giant construction machines, and you can hear them coming by the grinding of their molars and the shaking of the dunes.

8) The Illusion. The thing that happens when your mind refuses to accept that you are not at the beach all the time, and will not function in any other mode. You may be at the office, but you are at the beach. You are in bed, but you are at the beach. You are standing in line at the DMV but you are at the beach. The flashes of disassociated sun will get more and more frequent, until the afflicted slips into a permanent beach coma, where they are unable to stand upright, and may actually sunburn without exposure. Sometimes you will hear them humming in their dreams, a back and forth tide sound. When you stand in the ward surrounded by them, it becomes an actual wave, sshhing and swooshing on their tongues.

Buster :(

My mother's dog Buster got run over by a truck a few days ago. He ran out into the gravel farm road to chase an Amish buggy, and a truck sped up to pass the buggy and hit him. Then kept going. So if you are that person, who just left a dog in the road, you are the worst kind of asshole, I hope you know that. I hope you are still thinking about what a dick you are. If you believe in God, you should know my mother does too, and right now she's got more points with him.

Buster was a dog's dog. He chased deer and horses and goats. He killed things that came into his yard. He hated doorbells. And he loved Mom so much. I hate that she's all alone out on the farm now, and that there isn't much I can do to make her feel better. I want to go out immediately and get her another puppy, but I know you're not supposed to do that. She'll pick out another dog when she's ready. I'll miss him too. We were just starting to love each other, me and Buster. I have a scar above my knee from when he first arrived, all scared and knee jerk. The last time I saw him, he was happily running around the woods, and just wanted to be pet and scratched and then run off again. He was the best sort of animal I would want guarding my mother.

Any way, so that happened. Poor Mom. Poor Buster. It was quick. I tried to tell her it was like a wolf dying during a hunt, when you're a hunting animal, you don't die of old age usually. And so we'll say he died the sort of death an honorable dog might wish for, the quick confrontational warrior kind. A dog's death.

Girls on Film

The art school cinematheque put on a "vintage" night at the Norwalk movie theater. It happened the same day as a pool party on the opposite side of the highways, and I almost didn't go because I wanted to get back into the pool, but I did really want to see Barbarella on the big screen. So Collie and I hopped in my quickly falling apart car, and drove the hour fifteen to the Firelands, blasting Shakira and fucking ourselves up on caffeine. I've since moved onto a Weakerthans kick, which is a bi-annual thing, usually late summer and then early spring. But its good to remember that Shakira deserves a place in your heart.

I hate when people tell you they have no type. Everyone has a type, and most people who are not you can see what it is really easily, your type I mean. People have a hard time identifying their own type. They think they are into some particular things, but over and over again there are other more important qualities/flaws.

I thought about types while watching the movie, because movie stars try to be everyone's type right? That's their job. Even the not so attractive character actors, they have to have charisma. And the girls especially. I mean, that's the whole point of having weird categories like ingenue or femme fatale or girl next door. They have to find their particular charisma and hone it like a sharp knife, keep it glistening and professional. I like Anne Margaret for that best honestly. Jane Fonda does a pretty impressive imitation of her. It's unfair that any one is born looking like those two.

What's weird is how ugly all the men are in the sixties and seventies. I mean, okay, not all of them. There are the timeless ones. But most of them, even the attractive ones, look terrible in those styles. Okay, not terrible. Just...not appealing. I think it's the hair I don't like I most of all. Is there a rule that with trending styles, womens' hair can be great or mens' hair can be great, but never the two together at the same time in the same place in history or the entire fabric of the universe will split like a chlorinated strand of blonde tress? I think I'm still bitter about what the Rachel did to the evolution of the art form. Bitter and in awe.

There was some dating site going around which matched people based on their facial structures, and matched you with someone who looked most like you. It seems laughable at first, until you go on facebook and stare at the profile pics your friends have of them and their significant others, and it starts to seem logical. Like, the two people most in love will have the same noses, or the same expression in their eyes. Same crooked smiles or arch to their eyebrows or ridge of their lips. Then apply that to the guys you are attracted to the most - the broad shoulder Irish eyed close cropped ones, or you know, whatever. So, is that how I think I would look closest to if I were a guy? Maybe. I know I like people who have eyes that look like mine. Every once in a while though someone completely different sneaks in, right? And then you're like, whatever, I don't HAVE a type.

I think that dating site is genius though.

I'm really glad I saw Barbarella for the first time in that theater though, it was worth the drive. I don't think it would have been the same at all if I had just watched it in someone's living room. The colors mostly. The colors were great. Tomorrow night, they're playing a "surprise" movie, which is some old Hollywood comedy, and I'm such a dork, I'm so excited. The nice thing about movies is that you can forget about inviting people or organizing plans or meeting up. You can just go by yourself and sit there, and be still and silent. I think I like going by myself now more than with others. I guess I shouldn't have said that since my friend is going with me tomorrow, and now maybe he'll take offense. Point is, I'll be so fucking sad when it snows again, and I can't drive out to the beach and then the movies again without dealing with crappy roads. Man. It's August already. What the hell happened there?

Every time I drive around looking for new places, I somehow end up in Norwalk. I think I've come into Norwalk by every conceivable road imaginable. It's actually getting too familiar for me. Like, who would have thunk Norwalk would become my sister city in Ohio? I would have totally guessed Toledo first, right? I love you Norwalk. Even the sad parts of you. Especially the water tower and the park.

Quickie

I have a couple posts coming but even though I sat down here with the best of intentions, my laptop battery is dying and it just started raining but its still very sunny out, which you know means there's a rainbow out there somewhere. So I just can't sit here. Sorry, it's summer, do I really need an excuse? Do I need to be accountable to you of all people?

I went to my friends house yesterday to hang out, and one of the girls there brought garlic chocolate chip cupcakes, and marshmallow filled cupcakes, and chocolate beet cupcakes. The garlic ones were amazing. So since I respect the hustle so much, you all should check out Rosy Girl Baked Goods. If someone would like to buy me some Earl Grey cupcakes, or chocolate cherry with fennel frosting? I would not turn that down. I may even say thank you, once I stopped having a mouth full of cake. Now I have to go drink a bloody mary with my sister and do some laundry and probably watch more Mad Men at some point today after the sun goes down. And I just want to note that an alien would never be able to hide in Ohio, because we would know something was wrong the moment they couldn't open a freezee pop with their teeth.

The Courageous Transitions Building

How does an architect design a rehab house? What are the thought processes that go into that? Vomit and blood and piss proof? Providing a sense of privacy without giving any of the actual thing? What does the architect think about while drawing these doors and hallways meant to keep people together and visible, like expensive daycares, teaching us to stay in groups. Does he think about trying to make it pretty? How the sunlight will shine through windows in order to give spots of happiness to the concrete and tile. How best to make someone feel safe and secure while still imprisoned. Do architects collect design features? I think they must, like I collect thoughts or musicians collect chords. People who want to change the topography must be aware of the details.





Things that people are addicted to: sensations, endorphins, superiority, wind, cable tv, sugar, cigarettes, filth, shame, self loathing, compliments, noise, sex, power, weakness, makeup, alcohol, approval, animals, speed, sleep, money, love, heroin, stupor, escape, hero worship, politics, sarcasm, g.o.d (good orderly direction), newness, the golden light.

Reasons Why: the speeding up of the notes in the song as the guitar gets faster and faster like an approaching train, the sharp thrill of the tiny little hairs of your arm at a foreign touch, the cunningness of nature, the tininess of ears, the fear of obscurity, a loneliness that increases with every conversation that doesn't live up to expectations which you have with someone you'd like to sleep with, the niceness, the pleasantness, the relief, the relaxing into something familiar, the hormonal imbalances, the chemical cravings on a deep trained cellular level, the desire to distract, the fun of it, the Just Because, the Why Not.

Reasons Why Not: Because there is a deep well inside you, one that you keep boarded up in order to stop town children from falling into. The well is dark and goes very far down, and when you look into the graduating blackness of it, you hear a sound coming up from the bottom, a sigh, a long whisper. It tells you that you will always be alone, because no one is ever really going to understand the thoughts you have. Not all the way. Not even if they have similar ones. The thoughts you have are unique completely to yourself, your particular random compilation of genetics and experience. You are a snowflake, a special all together by yourself snowflake. Everyone has this dark place. Sometimes people like that place a lot. Sometimes people go and sit in that cool dark place when its really hot outside. But its a terrible place to be helpless.

There were so many spiders living here. There were spiders in every corner, every door jamb and windowsill. Long skinny red ones and fat crunchy brown ones. Tiny little worker ones scurrying alongside out of the sight of the giant aristocratic great white shark ones. Better to be small and unseen than hated and unloved for being the obvious monster, but ah such an admiration-less path. Can't be loved unless you risk being unloved. Dear little spiders, I didn't take any pictures of you. Instead I looked to the hungry and dangerous ones.

But I didn't really want to get to know any of the people who had been here. I wanted to avoid them, and thus avoid having to think about the unhappiness of probably people I've known and people I'll meet. Their pictures made me sad, their still packed bags and coats hanging in the closet, and the chairs outside where they would sit and smoke cigarettes, their motivational posters. I felt a repulsion to the human presence, as if it had soiled the beauty of the building of itself, the tiny little rooms like a honeybee cell and the thick glass walls. It should be an aquarium, or a pool, or a museum. Now it's been used up by dirt and despair and left to be subjected to black mold and insect invasions. It's insensitive of me. When the war comes, I'm on the side of the inanimate creations.

One of these closets leads to your happy place, where he pushed you against walls and whispered in your ear. The other one takes you to smoking cigarettes in the car during a rainstorm with a mix cd that your friend in California made you. The third one is just a closet, simple and plain and ready for curling up and shutting the door. The last one gets you out of here.

We've got obsessions. Go ahead, transition me. Try.

The Night That Every Concert Came to Cleveland

I had this whole thing I was going to write about when I got home tonight, like I had planned in my head that I would compose this whole funny fantasy show, where I pretended that Britney Spears (who was in town) sat in with the Decemberists, and she and Colin did a whole duet for Red Right Ankle, and then she had a spontaneous folk dance off with Pat Benatar (who was also in town), and Frightened Rabbit (WHO WAS ALSO IN TOWN) played back up while Colin sang Legionnaire. And like, probably in this fantasy, Britney also revealed she knew how to play the harmonica.

But instead what happened is I went to the Decemberists show in a red dress, which was at Nautica, this venue that seems great cause it's right on the river, and outside and stuff, but in fact ends up sucking a lot of energy out of shows because they are so strict about you staying in your seat. Which is some bullshit during a rock show, who stays in their seat? You cannot possibly expect me to sit in a certain place. You fucking stay in one place, somewhere else, awful yellow shirted uniformed person. Also you need to be able to dance, which is hard to do in bleachers, as in pretty impossible and also sort of dangerous. So the first part of the show was eh, was very serious and quiet, and no one was dancing at all. I was bouncing, but mostly everyone sat in their seat appreciatively tapping their knees, and that was some bullshit. It made me mad and antsy and gave me all sort of thoughts about trouble making, mostly involving the long ladders that led up from the bleachers into the lighting decks. But also then they played July July, which is MY song, and Architect and We Both Go Down Together, so pretty much all my favorite songs. I was happy enough. But I wasn't Happy. The band was trying, but the security guards had killed the crowd.

Then during the encore, they played Mariner's Revenge, and just as Mr. Meloy was getting done explaining how we all needed to make the whale sound, a giant cargo ship came around the curve of the river. A huge golden glowing monster of a thing, cranes and all, and corners and levels and mechanics. Silently coming around the bend, directly behind the stage, the music echoing off the bulwarks, and there were a few men out on the decks watching us, and everyone in the theater was watching them with their jaw open, and for the entire length of this glorious dancing clapping stomping Spanish skirt of a song the ship passed prehistorically behind us. until it was gone, and the song was over in a roar, and everyone poured into the aisles.

That was the magic moment everyone had been waiting for, that unknown thing that is the difference between a night and a Night, and so we all went home relieved and full of wonder and in love again.

Not My Memories

When I commit my thoughts to paper, handwritten I mean, they immediately seem cheap and trite. I feel the same way about hearing my voice recorded now. I sound stuffy and sick to myself, like I have a permanent cold. All of this over documentation of ourselves these days is strange to me, and I try to imagine the side effects on society, but come up against that black matte wall of the unknown that happens when we stretch our thoughts. I had no way of recording myself when I was growing up, you either kept a journal or you didn't, but there were no videos of me, or voice mails, and very few photographs. I'm not calling it bad or good, but it's something, it's definitely different. There can be as many public footprints of you as any celebrity decades ago, like physically as many, numerically. I remember now my daughter sitting at her boombox, making cassette tapes of her own voice, pretending to be a dj, and even that's old now. I was going to make a point about all this online stuff in danger of disappearing any time, but I don't remember where those cassette tapes are, and most likely they are buried underground somewhere in Indiana.


Back when we were children, before television reruns of Stargate, we would spend our afternoons at the matinee, watching drivel and tripe dreamed up for us by cinematic scientists. Beautiful men and women would make eyes at each other 12 feet high in front of us, and in the seats the children all giggled and shrieked and threw popcorn at each other or made out in the back rows, while these black and white Perfections tried to teach us about good and evil, patriotism, love. How to be successful human beings.


One time my friends father won a live turkey at the matinee. He brought it home and took it to the basement to kill it. It was a huge old thing, with shiny yellow eyes and a mottled hairless blue neck. Her father chased it around the basement for twenty minutes until he able to corner it. It was making frantic scared bird noises. My friend cried the first time she told me about it, but then later learned to make it a funny story to the kids we knew at school. There developed, in the repeated retelling, a way of mimicking her father and the turkey so successfully, it became a conversation between the hunter and the prey, a comedic dialogue like we heard on radio shows.


We lived in a city block, and there was a large barn or garage behind our house, where we would find large black stag beetles living in the donut holes of left behind mill stones and brick debris. The Polish neighbors to the right of us had chickens, and we had chickens too, a few, I had a pet chicken myself. One day she escaped and the neighbors caught her and killed her. At least I assumed they did, my childish mind filling with thoughts of revenge and justice. More likely a dog got her. I knew how chickens died, how people liked to laugh at the body running and twitching while blood ran from the decapitated neck. And I ate chickens. I understood the relationship between this animal that was my pet and what I would be eating for dinner. But I never forgave them, because she had been mine and they took her. I remember how her body cavity fluttered with breath when I held her tight against my chest, and the short quick fragile movements of her red brown head.


People talk about the difference in national character then and now, but the only real difference I ever saw was this. When I was a child, it was not about "being great at being me." There was none of this idea that to make people like you, you only had to act like your true and natural self. No, in fact, we were taught that to make people like you, you had to act an exact and certain prescribed set of ways. You had to smile a particular way, and make sure your hair was cut just so, and have the right kind of figure. The truth of the matter, the absolute fact of human interaction has not changed since. Everyone wants to talk to an attractive confident person. This is genetic. But now, instead of telling you how to be, society wants you to invent the next cool thing. Being new and different is an asset. If you do it right. If you do it wrong, then you're a fool and everyone laughs at you. But there has to be a risk in there somewhere or everyone would do it. It's all very free flowing and natural now, capitalizing on your own personality rather than emulating. That stands the test of time, because now so many people who were ostracized in my generation are now heroes of culture. Hasn't it always been that way? The weirdos win, but only a very small minority of them. The attractive ones.


I had my bedroom painted several colors as I was growing up. I shared a sloped second floor room with my little sister when I was very little, and maybe it was painted light green? Or eggshell gray blue? Later, when my little brother was born, I moved into a room downstairs all by myself, that used to be my mother's personal space. It was painted this fuchsia pink, very bright. I remember sleeping by myself in that bed, with the door cracked open, and I could hear my parents as they talked late at night. All of my first secrets started in that room, my first personal thoughts, the things I snuck into the corners of the room, me singing to myself at night or talking to myself. Your very first own room is special. Later still, in the new house, I got to choose my color, and I picked a pale yellow to go with the white lace curtains. Colors were important to me as a child. The first recurring dream I remember having was being in a toy shop, and getting this marvelous machine, on which you could draw any pattern for fabric you wished, spots and stripes and pictures, and it would print it out. I had no idea as a kid that this would be possible one day, that in fact when I was older I would be able to draw these colors out in a computer and have it program the dye machines with satellite accuracy, and then be able to make clothes in any color I wished. When I was 6, I dreamed the future and didn't even know it. Over and over again, I went back to that place in my head, and created amazing clothes. Later I was obsessed with paper dolls. I cut out womens models from the Sears catalog, and drew clothes for them by hand, to scale, with little paper tabs drawn around the shoulders and legs, so I could cut them out and fold them onto my homemade dolls. As I got better, I made men dolls too, but often they were permanently frozen in positions of sports or lounging around pools, because they were from the mens leisure section. I don't remember what my men characters were like in my stories. The women were always tomboys, loud and funny. I wish I could remember how I made the men talk, I think now it would have been helpful in how I got along with men later, some perspective on my native inclinations. My true self.